Political Elites and Regime Change in the Middle East and North Africa
Project Overview
MENA-PERC is a research project funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (Grant Agreement No. 101044015), based at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. The project examines the structure, behavior, and transformation of political elites across the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular focus on Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey over the past century.
Combining large-scale data collection with computational text analysis, MENA-PERC investigates how elite coalitions evolve, how power is distributed within regimes, and how these dynamics shape processes of regime stability, crisis, and authoritarian transformation.
Research Focus
The project centers on three core questions:
- When do political elites choose exclusion over accommodation?
- How do elite coalitions emerge, and how are they structured and maintained in authoritarian regimes?
- Under what conditions do elites support or resist regime change, including autocratization and democratization?
Methodologically, the project integrates:
- systematic interview data from extensive fieldwork
- original datasets on political appointments, careers, and elite networks
- legislative speech corpora and text-as-data approaches
- computational methods for scaling political positions
Resources
Data
Datasets on political elites and legislative behavior
Replication
Data processing pipelines and replication material
Papers
Publications and working papers
Team
Principal Investigator
Kevin Koehler — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna
Research Team
Camille Abescat — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna
Théo Blanc — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna
Gennadii Iakovlev — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna
Berker Kavasoglu — Heidelberg University
Lorenzo Fruganti — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna / Scuola Normale Superiore
Julius Strunk — Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna / Scuola Normale Superiore
Contact
For questions, collaborations, or data access requests:
Kevin Koehler
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna
📧 kevin.koehler@santannapisa.it